The Massachusetts Department of Public Health on May 17 said it had confirmed a single case of monkeypox virus infection in a man who had recently traveled to Canada.

Paxlovid

Rising COVID-19 cases are driving up the use of therapeutics, with Pfizer Inc.’s oral antiviral treatment Paxlovid seeing a 315 percent jump over the past four weeks, U.S. health officials said on May 17.

The state of Massachusetts on May 12 agreed to pay $56 million to resolve a lawsuit by families of veterans who contracted COVID-19 during an outbreak at a veterans’ care center that killed 84 people early in the pandemic.

Merck

Merck announced that the company will lay off 170 people from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Acceleron Pharma, which was acquired during November 2021 for about $11.5 billion.

The BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron was estimated to be 23.1 percent of the coronavirus variants circulating in the United States as of March 12, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on March 15.

Lilly is investing $700 million to build a state-of-the-art facility in the Boston Seaport, as part of plans to advance the company’s RNA-based research and development activities. 

A founder of a Massachusetts compounding pharmacy whose mold-tainted drugs sparked a deadly U.S. fungal meningitis outbreak in 2012 was resentenced on July 7 to 14-1/2 years in prison after a federal appeals court overturned his earlier 9-year term.

At least seven people in five U.S. states were infected with the novel coronavirus weeks before those states reported their first cases, a new government study showed.

The United States reported the lowest number of new Covid-19 cases in nearly a year for the week ended May 23, with new infections dropping 26 percent from the previous seven days to just under 180,000, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county data.

PerkinElmer Inc. expanded the company’s presence in cell biology with the $260 million acquisition of Massachusetts-based Nexcelom Bioscience.